Sunday, July 26, 2009

Tracking me on Twitter

For a while, I have been thinking of hacking up a system which would track up all the tweets that talk of me - just for the fun of it. So, I started using the Twitter API and built up an hack to scan through the public timeline and store those tweets and to publish it later in whatever way deemed fit. Turns out, that's not so easy - since this public timeline only lists 20 recent tweets every minute (off the thousands or hundreds of thousands that might be generated.)

The right way to do this would have been to use the twitter firehouse, which of course is not openly available to everybody, or to use the search interface. As I was planning to shift the code to use that, I hit upon this neat little widget from Twitter, which allows me to create a widget to track all the tweets containing my name and allows me to publish this wherever. I am putting this up on this blog. I have taken out the widget showing my tweets to the new widget titled "Chatter about me on twitverse" and its a dynamically updating widget. At this moment, I am enjoying the look of the new widget on my blog.

Update: I have removed the widget from this blog since I have made my twitter stream private. You can still get the widget from the link.

Administrative note

All tech posts have now moved to http://tech.shreeni.info or you may subscribe to its RSS feed.
In due course, I shall be moving it out completely, so if you follow my tech posts, please shift to following that blog.

Note on Tech Log

All tech posts have now moved to http://tech.shreeni.info or you may subscribe to its RSS feed.
In due course, I shall be moving it out completely, so if you follow my tech posts, please shift to following that blog.